1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a swallowing-assistive drink for medicines, more particularly, to a swallowing-assistive drink which facilitates or helps swallowing medicines without difficulty and without giving foreign body sensation to patients, infants and aged persons who have difficulty when taking medicines in swallowing them with ordinary drinking water because of accompanying some pain (such as a bitter taste) owing to various diseases, infirmity or even in healthy people.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Medicines for internal use are generally taken orally with water or tea. However, patients, especially aged persons or the like are difficult to swallow such medicines with water or tea. They sometimes could not swallow well to be choked or left the medicine in their mouth when taking medicines in dosage forms of powders, granules, tablets or the like. Therefore, a sufficient therapeutic effect was not obtained, and further the patient had discomfort.
Although crashing tablets or mixing medicines into food such as boiled rice, miso soup or juice has thus been conducted when taking medicines, this is time-consuming and troublesome. Moreover, this procedure of crashing tablets sometimes resulted in not giving an expected therapeutic effect because the releasing-time of ingredients of medicine could not be controlled and masking of taste could not be performed and so on.
In order to cope with these problems, small tablets, jelly and decomposable tablets are designed as to dosage forms. Further for foods, additive powder for liquid foods which thicken the liquid foods (miso soup or the like) to make them to be swallowed easily is on the market.
However, there were problems that design only on dosage form as mentioned above can not lead sufficient effect and that the swallowing-improving agents for medicines have not yet been developed although there are some for liquid foods.